Environmental research group lambasts GOP field on climate change

The current Republican presidential contenders received a B.S. this week – but not the type they’d get by graduating from college.

Rather, they’ve won first place in the second-annual “Climate B.S.*” Awards sponsored by the Pacific Institute, an environmental research and policy analysis group, which uses B.S. as an abbreviation for “Bad Science.” The group says the awards are meant to showcase “particularly egregious, notorious, or well-publicized examples” of attempts to misinform or confuse the public and policymakers on climate issues.

“The choice among the current Republican candidates on the issue of climate change is scientific ignorance, disdain for science, blatant misrepresentation of facts, or naked political expediency, any one of which would make the individual candidates strong contenders for the 2011 Climate B.S. Award,” Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, said in a statement. “Combined? The group wins the 2011 Award hands down.”

Nearly all scientists and major scientific associations accept the viewpoint that the Earth is warming and that humans are very likely causing it by pumping greenhouse gases into the air, especially by burning fossil fuels. But the GOP candidates, faced with an increasingly influential tea party movement that has shown skepticism toward climate science, have either softened their previous acceptance of climate change or have come out as denying it.

The Pacific Institute points to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who has repeatedly voiced his skepticism on the campaign trail, as an example of a candidate who seems uninterested in the science, distorts or misrepresents the science for ideological reasons and also does so for political expediency.

“The science is not settled on this,” Perry said at a GOP debate last fall. He added he was concerned about hurting the economy with costly policies to address a problem he said might not exist.

The group also mentions former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who once said he believed humans are contributing to climate change but has since said he doesn’t know what’s causing the Earth to warm; and Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who previously warned his fellow GOP candidates against running from climate science but has since dialed back.

“The scientific community owes us more in terms of a better description or explanation about what might lie beneath all of this,” Huntsman told a Heritage Foundation event in December.